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True Medal Count?

A few times during the Olympics our ever enthusiastic BBC TV and radio presenters commented that we were on top of the medals table when you consider the number of medals we won in proportion to the size of the country. I noticed Hungary were doing well, and that New Zealand had a handful of medals, and I knew that their populations were significantly smaller than that from which Team GB sourced its talent from. I couldn’t help myself, the statistics obsessed nerd within got the better of me and I did some number crunching and worked out how many golds and how many medals overall other countries would have won proportionally if they had the same population as the UK.

So, a lot of countries in reality did even better than the wonderful Team GB. That’s not a bad thing, just nice to know that there must be a lot of very satisfied sports fans out there from other nations! If you want to know how other countries fared let me know and I’ll happily divulge more numbers.

However, there were six countries with bigger populations than the UK who didn’t manage a single medal between them. They are Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Philippines, Vietnam and Congo and together they have double the population of the United States. I think this is sobering and should remind us that for a vast percentage of the world’s population there are not the resources to put into enjoying the Olympics. As the celebrations die down we need to remember that there are things in this world that should take a higher priority than sport.